The development of capabilities in multicolor fluorescence for applications in pathology were introduced more than a decade ago [3, 6-8] but still have not achieved wide market acceptance. In particular, Dow et al. [7] describe a study where multicolor fluorescence was used to determine lymphocyte phenotype and activation status in melanoma tissue sections through a process of human interactive image analysis. More recently, multicolor fluorescence has been applied in pathology [9] and HistoRx, Inc. (New Haven, Conn.) has commercialized some of these approaches. All of these publications and applications describe the use of fluorescence based imaging technology in tissue cell analysis, but are limited in their application and do not address the need to understand the systemic or cellular systems biology of a tissue.
High content screening (HCS) and multiparameter HCS technologies were developed to automate cell analysis for drug discovery, HCS technologies are focused specifically on the measurement of individual targets or pathways in arrays of cultured cells treated with test compounds. However, HCS tools alone do not address the complete workflow of tissue based cellular systems biology.
Thus, a need exists to provide methods for producing and analyzing cellular systems biology profiles in order to more fully understand the systemic and complex interaction of cellular biology systems.